The Lean Legal for Startups Minifesto is a proposed strategy for efficiently managing your startup’s legal and legal-adjacent work streams, leveraging your Fractional GC as your cornerstone.
Get StartedThe idea that “because startups don’t have a lot of legal needs, they don’t need a GC” is backwards.
Seed and Series A founders are navigating, without inhouse counsel, a tension between sending everything to an expensive firm vs. executing on important early decisions on IP, finance & equity, internally on their own.
Do the GC, just do it fractional, or part time. They will (1) enable your team to appropriately self-service, (2) fulfill 80% of your remaining needs themselves, and, (3) identify special matters, using their industry experience and connections to source and/or manage the perfect solution for everything else.
Makes sense, right? Still you might ask--how’s that different than working with BigLaw? Three answers:
First, shop by word of mouth--especially from startup gatekeepers (e.g. investors, accelerators, accountants). Googling is tough because many brand leaders in lawyer curation are compromised by their incentive structure.
Shop for these credentials, in order.
Once you have a short list, engage multiple candidates--most startup lawyers waive their retainer, and working with them is the best way to experience the relationship before cutting other leads (assuming there is no utility role for those runners-up).
Second, know how to evaluate your GC’s success. Especially, see if they think, talk and act like a business owner. This means:
Get exclusive access to Part 3 and learn exactly what to do to help your company succeed at every step of your journey.
